


Ocean Deep, Sea Vast

by KiriJones



Series: A Great Big Storm [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Family, For the most part anyways, Gen, not canon one little bit, origins story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-09 01:48:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4329090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiriJones/pseuds/KiriJones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a file in the one Grant Douglas Ward kept deep in an old base of HYDRA. In it a note written in the clear and precise writing of John Garret makes an important note for future reference. It reads as follows: there are only two people Grant Ward cares for more than himself. For them he would burn down not only HYDRA and SHIELD but the world itself. They must be kept under watch at all times. Their names are Sarah Janine Ward and Rebecca Barnes Proctor. </p><p>Or where Grant is named for a man that saved the world and only two people matter and it changes everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Becca Barnes is twenty three years old she marries Douglas Proctor and does her best to move on with her life. She leaves New York and Brooklyn and all of her ghosts behind. Moving South she and Doug have a good marriage that ends with him dying due to a drunk driver and her seven months pregnant. 

So she gives birth and raises her daughter who is a sweet child but as she grows older Cindy grows darker and Becca does her best but as a single working mother Becca can only do so much and put food on the table and provide a roof over their heads. 

When Cindy is nineteen she marries one Ryan Ward. Beca does not like Him And the dark glint in his eyes but she holds her tongue  for the sake of her daughter. Ryan comes with one child, an arrogant boy names Christian. 

Five years later her first grandchild is born and as Becca holds him she sees her brother in him. From his dark hair to strong brow the baby has the Barnes look except for his dark eyes which echo those of his father. Cindy says her mother can name her grandson and holding back tears Becca chooses the name Grant. She names him for a small boy from Brooklyn who changed the world. Because hopes that Grant will hold a fraction of the courage and strength of his name sake and she knows that if he does no one who stands against him will stand a chance.

seven years later Becca is a bit older and is fighting cancer and as she holds her six month old grand daughter Cindy tells her is a brusque tone that her name is Sarah Janine. Cindy and Ryan dump the children with her for afternoon and Becca does her best to cheer up the brooding boy and the quiet girl. She does not inquire about her other grandson who is in the hospital with a broken leg.

For the afternoon Becca and Grant and Sarah are in their own little bubble. And when the time comes for Cindy and Ryan to come and take them Becca bends down on her old knees to look Grant in the eye, her strong and scarred and sacred grandson who is building an armor she does not know who to breach. So instead she tells him, "Grant you know for you and Sarah and Timmy I would scale the ocean and lay waste to the stars?" She means it as jest of childhood but she sees that Grant does not take it as that. 

She watches as his eyes bore into her own and then something changes. He solemnly looks at her and makes a vow that rattles her bones and soul, "I know Grandma. I would burn down the world for you and Sarah and Tim." He then buries himself in her arms and smiles. 

As she kisses his forehead and watches out the window as he leaves Becca will go back to her bed and sleep. But the memory will always stay with her. It stays with her until nearly twenty five years later when her guarded boy becomes a cold and callous man and a traitor. 

 


	2. Chapter II

After Grant goes to military school and then escapes and sets the house ablaze with Christian inside of it while Sarah is with her Becca decides enough is enough and she goes to court and files for custody of her granddaughter. With Timmy dead and her daughter a dark mass she does not recognize anymore Becca decides she will go down fighting if that is what it will take in order to protect her family. 

the day after she files the motion a man named John Garrett comes to her door and tells her that Grant is being taken out of custody and placed in training for young men with potential but comes from troubled backgrounds. He shows her reports and files and tells her that her motion has been taken care of and that she has complete and utter custody of Sarah. Be ca looks at him and her mind screams snake and that this is all too convenient. She demands to talk to Grant. John smiles and says that he is outside waiting for her. 

She finds Grant sitting outside her door on the steps watching eight year old Sarah running through the sprinkler with her old dog Toby chasing after her. she sits down beside her fifteen year old grandson and they sit in silence For a bit. She feels Garrett watching them through the glass and just as she opens her mouth to smack some sense into her grandson he beats her to it, with his hands clasped in front of him Grant meets her gaze. 

"Gran you know I would do anything for you and Sarah right?" It is asked as a question but they both know it is a statement. The only family that exists to Grant Douglas Ward anymore is an old woman who has battled cancer and a small slip of a girl with big blue eyes and brown hair that Becca used to have. They are Barnes through and through. She nods and allows the teen beside her to continue.

"Please do not question this. John is willing to help me. He says that he can help me be strong. And I want to be strong, I need to be strong.." Grant trails off after this and Becca wants to scream that is he strong. He is stronger than her and anyone else she knows. But she knows that if she says this he will not believe her. So she nods and goes to hug him with tears streaming down her face. 

And after Grant says goodbye to Sarah and promises that he will call and write every week Becca wonders why it feels like Grant has sold his soul to the devil. Years will pass before Becca comes to realize how true her thoughts are. 

Years pass and Grant keeps his promise and writes and calls, and slowly but surely Becca sees her already guarded grandson grow more callous and cold. When he visits or talks his voice is like the boy he used to be. He is warm and loving. But when Garrett comes to collect him or end the call it grows cold and blank. More than once she has said that if Grant wanted to stop whatever he was doing she would make it happen. But her boy smiles and his eyes grow cold and he says he is getting strong. So she drops the subject and never speaks of it again. 

Sarah grows into an independent child who is curious and questions everything around her with a gleeful abandon. She is the apple of Becca's eye and keeps her on her old toes. Sarah is diagnosed with a photographic memory after she begins to read adult  atlases   and encyclopedias for fun when she is barely ten. Skipping grades Sarah is posed to take over the world but it all comes crashing down when her grand baby is thirteen. Grant has entered into some training for the government under Garrett and he is excelling. 

Becca is on the phone with him when the police officer comes the door and tells her that Sarah is in the hospital. There was a hold up at the gas station Sarah was at with friends getting some snack for their Friday night situation of a movie and games. five people are dead and Sarah is in the hospital with a bullet in her chest and bleeding out. She barely keeps it together once she arrives at the hospital. Hours pass as she waits for the surgery to end. 

Eventually a doctor comes out and tells her they managed to remove the bullet but it nicked a corner of Sarah's small heart and if infection sets in it could be deadly. Grant arrives mere minutes later and holds her as she sobs. Once she calms down he goes to see Sarah and then leaves saying he has some business to take care of. 

Hours pass as she keeps a vigil at the bedside of the young girl. Grant arrives soon proceeds to go and wash his hands in the bathroom. Be ca gets up to question where he has been but she is stopped short when she sees that the water is running pink. She returns to her seat and takes a few shuddering breathes. Grant returns to sit beside her and takes her hand in his. There eyes meet and Becca is almost scared of what she sees there, rage and hatred and satisfaction for what he has done. She is almost scared because she knows Grant would never hurt her intentionally. So she sighs and rests her head on his shoulder.

Hours Turns into days and Satah stays Ina coma as the infection sets in and her hearts begins to fail. Because accepts the inevitable while Grant rages. Garrett comes by one day and Becca hears him scream that is Garrett will not keep his promises than Grant will not keep his. A week later Sarah crashes and is taken into surgery. grants has to hold her back as she screams for her baby and weeps in rage. It is like losing Timmy and Steve and Bucky all over again. 

Fifteen hours later a doctor she has never seen before exits the room and tells her that Sarah is alive and is responding to the procedure, because races to her side but not before she sees Grant look at Garrett who nods and smirks and flashes his teeth like a shark. 

Because does not care as she enters the room and sees Sarah awake and smiling yet high as a kite on drugs. But as Grant comes to join her Becca will wonder years later how after that operation Sarah never gets sick and is healthy as a horse. She never catches a cold or gets a fever. After her recovery Sarah is deemed to be in peak physical condition and she tests out of high school and goes to university at the tender age of sixteen to study medicine. 

Becca backs up her home and follows her grand baby to her hometown where she attends Columbia and plows through school and does cross country and track. She hears from Grant once and a while and learns to live with the ghosts that haunt her. They live in Hell's Kitchen and she stays away from Brooklyn with every bone in her body. 

When Sarah graduates and decides to head off to Harvard Grant sits beside her old bones as they watch Sarah walk across the stage. Her grandson looks so much like Bucky it hurts to look at him sometimes. She sees it in the way he carries himself and the way he speaks. yet her grandson still refuses to tell them what he does for a living but Becca has never forgotten the morning it was announced on the local news that the men responsible for hurting Sarah where found dead in the back of an alley killed in brutal ways. 

Becca loves Grant but she has never forgotten what he he is capable of or what he is. Years pass once more. And when SHIELD falls from the sky and agents come to collect her and take her in for questioning and her own protection she wants to tells them that they are wrong, but she knows who and what Grant is. So instead she holds her tongue and goes with them to Washington and when she sees Sarah she wonders how many of these agents will die this time when Grant comes for them?


	3. Chapter 3

When Sarah Ward is nineteen years old she spends a semester abroad in order to expand her horizons and to try and get away from her family for a bit. Sarah loves her Grams and Geant but sometimes she suffocates under their protective Measures. Yes she was shit and her heart was technically broken but it healed and she is fine. Almost too fine sometimes she thinks. Ever since the operation that saved her life Sarah has never gotten sick and is is top top physical shape ver though she does not do anything to get there. It is something that has always bothered her but she does not question it, she is alive And with her family. That is all that matters.

So Sarah chooses to go to a small and isolated country called Sokovia and it is here she learns the language, a guttural cross between German and Serbian. She speaks in fragments and all she wanders the capital city Sarah does her best to try and live. And it is here she meets a boy who will impact her life for years to come.

Sarah is not a super model in the looks department but in no way is she ugly. She thinks she is of average height and build. She has hat her grandmother calls the Barnes look with her dark hair and pale skin. Unlike a Grant she has inherited the big blue eyes of her grand mother and mother. 

Sarah is at the bar late one Friday night with some of her school friends when he offers to buy her a drink. Due to the abuse of her mother and father Sarah is as straight edge as they come. It does not mean she will not enjoy a night out but she chooses to avoid anything that clouds her judgement and inebriated her so she refuses his offer twice before he seems to get it through his head that she is not interested. He then looks at her thoughtfully before he offered her his hand and asks in his accented drawl if she would like to dance.

sarah almost refuses because she knows his type with his dark hair and blue eyes and muscled body. He a ladykiller who spits them out after he does his dance and plays his game. And if there is one thing Sarah Ward will not be it is played. Yet she has always played it safe and this break is for her to get away and escape her obligations even if it just for a little while. 

So she takes his hand and lets him lead her to dance floor Where they dance the night away. Swaying in time with the music pressed close enough that she can feel his heart beat if she listens something within her loosens and she ends the night shaking his hand and walking away laughing as she walks back to the dorms of the small university. 

One week later she is back and so is he. Third eyes lock across the room and as if drawn together by a magmatic pull they meet and collide. He asks for her name, she demands his. And so it begins.

Pietro is the first of many things for Sarah. He is the first man who makes her feel as if she could fly. He almost makes her trust him. He shows her the backstreets and kisses her and makes her smile and feel care free. 

She holds no illusions and she is sure that he is is doing this dance with a handful of other women at the same time. However she is grateful for what he gives and for the freedom she feels. Yet as the summers draws to a close the time comes for her to return to New York and to Columbia and to fIndian her last year. 

One last night she allows herself to dance with him and to feel their hearts beat intadem. And when he makes her fly amongst the sky Satah is forced to admit that maybe she could have loved him. She almost tells hi. But does not.Instead she leaves him with a kiss come morning light and boards a plane without saying goodbye. After all she knows what they were. Goodbye is not expected or needed. 

(And if for years afterward she mourns for what could have been she keeps it to herself. Yet around her neck she wears a simple and slender silver chain he bought her at a market where the sun was shining and she was smiling and he was looking at her like she was something beautiful. it is something she never forgets and always keeps close to her heart. One day when she comes crashing into the life of a man who runs as fast as the wind with Snow White hair it will be the one thing that saves her. Yet she does not know this. Like many things in the life of Sarah Ward it will come after much trial and tribulation.)

When Sarah is finally beginning her internship in a hospital in Manhattan aliens invade New York City and she sees Captain America and a god and spies and a raging monster and Iron Man defend the city. Sarah herself is among those caught in the struggle and it is on the streets she learns the price of war as she stitches together skin and keeps innards from falling out. 

When she talks to her Grams after about the Captain and the Avengers she tries to ignore the pale skin and shocked expression of her grandmother, who goes on to mutter about stupid boys from Brooklyn under her breath, she chalks it up to old age. 

Years pass and when Sarah Ward is twenty-five she watches like many as SHIELD falls and Hyrda is revealed and all of use answers about Grant are answered in a dark room by a man named Coulson who demands that she reveal where her brother is hiding. 

Sarah, even if she knew something, would not give it to him but what does catch her eyes is the brunette with the Britsh accent who comes into the room and softly asks only once where Grant is. And it is in that moment Sarah knows that this scientist namednJemma Simmons and her brother shared something. The one named Skye is bitter yet Jemma is the one who is aching. 

Sarah wants to demand answers and scream at the skies in hatred for what John Garrett did and what Grant was hiding. But instead she sits and wait along with Grams, she waits for Grant to come and find them. 

And find them he does in a shower of bullets and blood. And when they flee Washington and he looks back at the womean named Jemma Simmons behind them Sarah holds his hand because her owen heart sometimes aches for the boy who never loved her the way she could have loved him (lies her heart says, lies. The love is always there even if she denies it).

driving into the mountains of Montana takes time and it is on the long nights of switching cars and train hopping and indenting switching that Sarah gets her answers. And it is in the files Grant stole from a safe house of Hydra in Baltimore that she wants to hurl as she reads about one James Buchannon Barnes and of the Winter Soldier and what Hydra has done to them all. The heart grown for her and the blood transfused into Grant and the bone marrow Grams received when she had cancer. All of them experiments in the games Hydra played. 

Now the qestion remains the same; what now?

 


	4. Chapter 4

Grant Ward knows he is a monster, a opportunist. he gleefully takes pride in these titles and everything else people call him. It means he is still here, it means he is a survivor. He has done what it took in order to keep his family alive and whole and together. Does he regret taking the offer Garret and Hydra gave him all of those years ago? The answer is no. And he never will. 

Yes they played him like an instrument and used him like a puppet. But because of them Grant is label to keep his Gran and younger sister safe. It is because of the cruel games played and the hard lessons learned that Grant was able to Storm the pathetic base in Washington and get his family out. It is because of Hydra that they are still free, albeit on the run, almost seven months after he got them out. It has been a year since Hydra fell and he has never looked back. 

There are only two things that give him pause. The first is Jemma, Grant sometimes allows himself to miss her. Miss the taste of her lips and the smell of her skin. Sometimes he almost wishes she could have come with them. But he knows that Jemma would never be ok with this life. Nothing matters to Grant except for his family. Blood is always thicker than water. For Gran and Sarah he would burn down the world without a second thought. For them he would even kill Jemma if that is what it took to keep them safe. Would his heart mourn and turn even more brittle and black? Yes. As loathe as he is to admit it she owns a little part of his dark and cold and guarded heart. She wormed her way in when he was not looking, she resides there with Gran and Sarah. 

The second thing that bothers him is one James Buchanan Barnes. An ally of Captain America and  not time war hero andHowling  Commando. Most recently known as the Winter Soldier and one of the formidable weapons Hydra has assembled in their arsenal. They had used the blood of Barnes to perform countless transfusions on himself after his missions and even without his knowledge. They has used his bone marrow after the last cancer scare Gran had a few years prior. They had ripped out half of his heart and cloned it so that Sarah could survive the robbery a decade ago. 

After reading the files and forcing his grandmother to tell the truth he is not sure even now all these months later how to react. He was named after Steve Rogers and is related to a man who was a great hero and is now a mass murder and assassin. According to genetics the man is family and Grant feels some sympathy for the man. He truly does. Grant chose his path that made his hands become stained red and his heart darken. He did it to survive and to make it so that those closest him could live well. Barnes never had a choice. But no matter, if the missing Winter Solider comes even close to his family Grant will kill him. 

He has not told his his family but he finally has answers for his health and advanced skills and muscle memory and healing time. Hydra took the serum that made Rogers superhuman and tried to duplicate it to the best of their knowledge. They used it in the Red Room and on the Winter Soldier. Grant has the blood of the Soldier coursing through his veins. Sarah has part of his heart pumping blood through their veins, both of them are in peak condition in all ways. He wonders if this was the plan of Hydra all along? To create a bloodline to harvest from. To create assassins and near super humans who could pass as normal but fight with the best of them. 

grant can understand this goal. It is ingenious in a way, and because of his desire to protect his family he played right into their hands. And in the end it is the one thing he can never forgive nor forget. They involved his family. He could have left well enough alone and kept his head down, he'll he maybe would have even gone back. 

Now instead he is destroying bases left and right burning them all to the ground in order to get his revenge. He leaves nothing for Hydra to recover or Shield to uncover. He will burn both down to the ground if that is what it takes. Five months in he ends up in the Ukraine with Sarah and Gran in a safe house miles away. He destroys a laboratory but pauses when he uncovers a vial of the serum given to the Soldier. He takes two of the vials and pours the rest into a incinerator. 

Later that night he has Sarah inject him and he then injects her saying it is something to protect them against truth serums and the like. Instead it makes them both sick for day and almost kills them both. Once he awakens Grants feels new in a sense, his old war wounds do not ache anymore and he is faster and stronger. Sarah yells at him for days and refuses to speak to him for nearly a month, he does not care. 

He has given her a weapon and something. Hat will help them in the future if they should be separated or if he should fall. Sarah looks at him differently after that. But she still stays. Gran on the other hand looks at him warily, just like she always has since the day he was a child and said he would burn down the world to for her and Timmy and Sarah. There is a reason he loves her the most. Gran has always seen him for what he is. She may not like it but she has learned to accept it and love him regardless if the fact. He can only hope at the end of all of this Sarah can follow in her footsteps. If not he will cross that bridge when he comes to it. 

Eventually they stay in Europe where they wind up in the country of Sovokia. Sarah knows the country and speaks the language. He picks it up somewhat quickly and soon prepares to try and get to the Hydra stronghold there. But then the Avengers have to come and ruin it all with a robot that thinks itself a god. 

He wants to leave but his instincts tells him to stay put and tread carefully. He does and what follows makes him wonder if he has always know they were being watched, it makes him wonder. After all blood will always call to blood. And the blood of the Winter Soldier runs through his veins. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter the Ward clan will finally come face to face with James Barnes in Sokovia of all places as Sarah comes face to face with her past and the Winter Soldier will have to choose between blood and water.


End file.
